Archive for January, 2008
January 28, 2008 at 1:00 am · Filed under content, social networks
No meta data. No way of knowing who’s read a journal or paper before. Of knowing what they thought of it. At least unless you’re the librarian or have one of those special CIA computers that track books on particular subject matter like “The Idiots Guide to making Nuclear Fission in your living room”.
Ok, it’s too late on a Sunday night to go into this in depth, but the last post has me thinking of how we use libraries, or rather why I don’t. Why can’t I go down to Whitechapel public library and have the same experience I can have looking up a book on Amazon. Why can’t I have a better experience, after all, the public library doesn’t have the same commercial agenda as a publicly listed company. And an academic library is actually there to promote and encourage the transformation of information stored in books, to useable knowledge in someone’s head.
So why isn’t there a way to capture a reader’s thoughts as they’re reading or browsing. And of displaying this to the next 12 year old looking for Deathly Hallows. Or computational chemist looking for some shit hot molecular vibration modeling information. Libraries have to start organizing information differently. Turn the card files into networks. Two way networks and allow us to rank and annotate them. And communicate through them.
There was a time music was accessed by artist name, album name or song title only. Didn’t matter if that was online or in Virgin Megastore. MySpace changed that. Now we find new music through networks. There’s a lesson and a model there for our libraries.
David Weinberger’s “Everything Is Miscellaneous” dealt well with why this information is needed. Now we need an altruistic version of Mark Zuckerberg to build an Open Source network for Libraries worldwide to hook up to.
Posted by:
Cian O'Donovan
January 28, 2008 at 12:26 am · Filed under McLuhan, content, social networks
First off a full disclosure: I read John Naughton’s “The Networker” column in today’s Observer on printed news sheet version I bought from Hackney Road’s best minimarket, Ince. I’m sure Gutenberg would be delighted by that, as no doubt Mr. Ince was when I handed over my £1.90. A lot of money for something I’ve gone and re-read online for free. I think by admitting that I’m removing myself from the demographic this post is all about but such is life.
A couple of thoughts on Naughtons words, or more to the point, the study by the British Library and UCL on the information-seeking habits of young people he refers to. The report says amongst lots of other interesting things that we are spending as much time searching for information as consuming it. It also states that we’re not spending much time on the media once we find it. We read, then move on to the next object on the same horizontal plane.
What does this mean? It means two things: first Google, Amazon and iTunes have a ways to go in terms of getting us media easier and quicker. There’s a debate swirling at the moment about human search and what it has to offer a world in which Google are paying all the best engineers to make sure their algorithm stays in first place. Of course that assumes that finding the information is the end goal. Sometimes the search is as entertaining as the media at the end.
Take Twitter, it could be said that the micro blogging application/universe is really a passive search tool. I connect/follow all those I think will point me to useful data and hey presto, I get pointed to media I invariably find interesting. This is a form of human search. And because of the social nature of the search I enjoy the process as much, if not more than the end result. Marshall would be proud, in this case the medium really can be the message.
Second, isn’t this method of consumption very much like the way we use some social networks, and I’m thinking MySpace in particular. We connect, consume media that our new friend has posted, then move on. All the time we’re at the same rung of the hierarchical ladder.
Over the past 12 months many have looked at News Corps purchase of MySpace and wondered if maybe Rupert Murdoch in his senior years had shot his wad on Tom co. Facebook was the cool new thing led by a twenty-something year old with the best PR since Mother Theresa. But the Facebook fanboys have been quiet of late. MySpace has been getting some spring cleaning and the media-model it’s build on is looking sound enough.
So what does that add up to? Well at the end of their report the British Library team come to some conclusions. They say the days of paid-for library searches, additional pins and passwords to get into bespoke cataloguing software, and separate, non-connected databases for online and offline information are over. Users just couldn’t be bothered. Users want a one stop shop. Users want to use their Google toolbar. If libraries want to remain relevant they’re going to have to open up and let Google, MySpace or whoever it may be in.
Posted by: Cian O'Donovan
January 21, 2008 at 11:24 pm · Filed under media, technology, tv
Millicent, the super lo-fi, low-cost, use-it-with-web2.0-things is profiled in today’s MediaGuardian. This is great. I think. Particularly the distributed collaboration aspect.
Let’s see if we can get a demo of this for a team that is split in three locations around the British Isles and is producing non-live content for web and broadcast. We’ll post some results here maybe.
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Posted by:
ds
January 17, 2008 at 12:51 pm · Filed under communication, community, media, social markers, sport
Blogs with cartoons, that’s the way it should be done, and nobody does it better than Hugh McLeod.
His post on “social markers” has some great insights. But it’s the example Hugh uses that really catches my attention. By using the Boston Red Sox, McLeod points out probably the greatest social marker on the planet. At least for the 50% of people with “Mr.” in front of their names. Sure beer and pussy are pretty big ones too for us males, but if sport wasn’t invented for this purpose someone like Mark Zuckerberg would have to round up some funding to do it.
So why do so many sports websites fail to get this? Sure there are some great community sports ventures, I’m thinking sportingo.com and the like, but big media hasn’t done a lot of note other than the standard web forums as seen on the likes of espn.com and skysports.com. These simply do not engage users the way social nets do. Sports news and analysis is piled high on the back of an 18 wheeler running red lights on a one way street.
This is something Setanta.com can build on. Right now Setanta is showing the best slate of big-time boxing fights the UK has seen in years. It’s a sport with renewed vigour because of the likes of Joe Calzaghe, Ricky Hatton and David Haye. And the boxing community has jumped in and are using any available means of communication to tell us how much they like it. We simply have to give them a better way of communicating this passion than web forums, reply boxes to articles and email addresses.
Great cartoon btw Hugh.
Posted by:
ds
January 11, 2008 at 12:30 pm · Filed under art, film, london, magazines
The Serpentine are showing McCall and Tyndall’s “Argument” on Thursday 17th January. Any takers?
A screening of McCall and Andrew Tyndall’s feature-length film
Argument, followed by a presentation by artist Aurélien Froment, whose
work deals with archives and film as a metaphor. Argument is a dense
and provocative feature-length essay examining one issue of the New
York Times magazine to investigate the ideology of news, the language
of fashion and the construction of masculinity.
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ds
January 10, 2008 at 5:55 pm · Filed under media
Paddy Power paid out on Mr. Obama taking the whole Democratic nomination before the New Hampshire primary. Why? Well like his compatriot Tony O’Leary, Paddy Power jnr. has never been one to back off some (relatively) cheap publicity. That and the fact that 7 US polls had Obama in the lead 24 hours before polling.
Poll are like campaign debates. Pseudo-events that are created and facilitated for a media that will not engage fully with candidates and pose the tough questions. In this case the polls were dead wrong. By up to 13 points.
This has huge implications for all candidates from here on. And as CJR.org points out there are no easy answers for the pollsters. The answer for the media outlets: Lead with the facts guys and let’s get over the numbers and the spin.
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Posted by:
ds
January 7, 2008 at 5:52 pm · Filed under Setanta, social networks, sport
After a couple of hours playing with the Setanta RSS feeds
everything’s ready to go. So go follow twitter.com/setanta for all your Premier League football news.
Nothing groundbreaking that other media outlets aren’t doing here, but wait until @setantacritic gets going…
Posted by:
Cian O'Donovan
January 6, 2008 at 10:07 pm · Filed under communication, community, content, media, politics, social networks, sport
Jeff Jarvis and Dave Winer have put together an interesting collaborative media review tool over the past few days. It’s worth checking out at http://twitcrit.scripting.com/changes.html.
The technology is simple. Get a Twitter account, track down and start following @twitcrit, then message @twitcrit with any media review that takes your fancy. So far so easy if you can script and rummage around an api. But let’s step back from Jarvis’ critique of the latest Democratic prez debate (hey Jeff, why all the hating on you boy Barack?) and look at what this approach does to media interaction.
The wonderful thing about Twitter is that it is a nice simple lightweight medium for one to many broadcasting. Using a browser, a desktop app or a normal SMS from a phone, anyone can send 160 characters of love, hate or debate to those that “follow” their tweets. There’s no walled gardens (Facebook etc.) which means the user can get information in and and out of Twitter with the minimum of fuss.
Up until now Twitter has been great in situations such as conferences, where, for a short period of time only, people need a one-to-many communication structure. It also did a job during recent Californian fires. But all of these uses have been somewhat simplistic. There’s not a lot done with the data on either side of the transport. Message is entered into Twitter, Twitter sends it on it’s merry way, tweet is read at the other end. Bosh!
But how about we start some smart aggregation as Jarvis is suggesting. How about instead of treating each tweet as an isolated many-to-one message, we aggregate it with other likeminded tweets so that we have many many-to-one tweets all sorted and bunched on the receive side. We then start building a picture of what the crowd is thinking on any particular subject, and importantly (as this really comes into its own in live situations) we get a picture of how the crowd’s collective mind is changing as the debate/show/movie/game is progressing.
So how’s this different from those calls to action for standard text messages during X-Factor and the like? Twitter is the difference here. All of this messaging takes place within a defined (but relatively open) infrastructure. We can follow our tweets. We can reply to others and we can interact on a plethora of devices in different ways.
Two applications immediately jump to mind. Elections. Live sport. Howard Dean and the rise of the A-List blogger made blogging the big story of 2004. Can Twitter have an impact this time around?
As for sport, we have a bit longer to think about that, but at the very least a live play-by-play of the Super Bowl, or the multimillion dollar 30 second spots that surround it is a goer in a few weeks.
Now, one final issue. What and how does big media get a piece of this action?
Posted by:
ds
January 2, 2008 at 11:32 pm · Filed under McLuhan, community, media, social networks
In the week that Big Brother once again pokes its nasty head out of room 101 here’s some words from Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media pp 67:
Having extended or translated our central nervous system into the electromagnetic technology, it is but a further stage to transfer our consciousness to the computer world as well. Then, at least, we shall be able to program consciousness in such wise that it cannot be numbed nor distracted by the Narcissus illusions of the entertainment world that beset mankind when he encounters himself extended in his own gimmickry.
If the work of the city is the remaking or translating of man into a more suitable form than his nomadic ancestors achieved, then might not our current translation of our entire lives into the spiritual form of informations seem to make of the entire globe, and of the human family, a single consciousness?
Adding McLuhan’s two points together: if we get social we get rid of Big Brother and the rest of our navel gazing “reality culture”. Yet it could be argued that “reality” media is the apex of media development in the four decades since McLuhan wrote the above. It’s not an argument I’m going to make right now though. That’s one for Andy Duncan over at Channel 4.
Posted by:
ds
